Hi folks,
I’m really new to Unreal.
Basic question here: at the moment i’m still in the “messing around and trying stuff” phase in UE4.
Sometimes, when i change a parameter, i won’t see the effect until i press “build”. Sometimes it takes quite a while for this process to complete. And i find the program in general pretty laggy, compared to Blender (which is what i’m used to).
So my question is, does a powerful videocard (like a 2080 ti) speed up this process (build specifically)? And make the program less laggy? Or is all that stuff actually done on the CPU, so a faster videocard wouldn’t help matters?
This is a really basic question, sorry, i know, but you gotta start somewhere!
cheers! … D
In general, no it doesn’t speed up lighting built times. It’s rendering all of the lighting with Lightmass and there is actually a GPU-based modification available, but it’s only usable if you can fit all of your scene in memory which can be tough with many game levels, cards don’t usually have that much memory.
OK, thanks! … may i pick your brains for just a moment more?
What i actually want to do is use UE4 for creating video art. I have no interest in games!
So i’ll create my stuff, then render it out in the master sequencer and i’m done, that’s all i want to use it for…so only cinematics.
So what, then, if any, benefit would i see from a 1300 euro video card compared to the 150 euro video card i’m using at the moment? Would it speed any part of the process up for me?
Or does a heavy-weight videocard only have an impact on the actual playing of the game and gives no advantage during the creation and “rendering” phase?
OK, i did some further reading and i’m really confused.
This from the interwebs (https://www.workstationspecialist.co…%20in%20games.)
“Unlike other professional applications Unreal Editor does not use the GPU for any compute capabilities and solely uses your graphics card for display output to your screen. With this in mind, a higher end graphics card will only benefit your frames per second (FPS) in your viewport, as well as in games.”
OK, so in terms of the things you create, it only uses the CPU?
But then it uses the GPU to output my creation to the screen?
Huh?!
What does this mean in practice for me? Where should i spend my money? Only on a high-end CPU. Or do i also need a fancy GPU?
I don’t get it! :o
Bumpizzle, please help a noob peoples!!
Please wait a few days to bump a thread
For building lighting, it uses the CPU entirely by default. Doing this, it bakes the lighting to images which are mapped onto the geometry, and it takes a while because it calculates bounce lighting and it has to do the entire level. After that, the software relies on the GPU heavily to display things in the viewport, so there’s still some real-time stuff that’s getting calculated on the GPU so there’s still a great benefit to having a good GPU.
Also, there’s other options available for rendering, like realtime ray tracing, which requires an RTX graphics card. Using the realtime ray tracing calculates all of the lighting in realtime so you can immediately see what your lighting looks like. So if you’re just using UE4 for rendering, you can explore getting an RTX graphics card so that you can do ray tracing and avoid having to build your lighting at all.
Thanks again, my plan is to use UE for great looking cinematic stuff (nothing to do with games) so i guess a great GPU is a good idea, i’ll probably hold out for the 3080ti and then splash out on an all new high end PC.